Hardware

iFixit: iPhone XS and XS Max teardown

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Lots and lots of pictures. If nothing else, take a look at Step 6 (the SIM slot), and Step 12 (the L-shaped battery).

From the conclusions:

  • Critical display and battery repairs remain a priority in the iPhone’s design.
  • A broken display can be replaced without removing the biometric Face ID hardware.
  • Liberal use of screws is preferable to glue—but you’ll have to bring your Apple-specific drivers (Pentalobe and tri-point) in addition to a standard Phillips.
  • Waterproofing measures complicate some repairs, but make difficult water damage repairs less likely.
  • Glass on front and back doubles the likelihood of drop damage—and if the back glass breaks, you’ll be removing every component and replacing the entire chassis.

That last bit is an issue. Here’s a post from 9to5Mac that shows off a variety of drop tests. Check out that image at the top, which shows shattered back glass.

This year’s iPhones likely to establish a lasting tech lead thanks to 7nm A12 chip

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Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:

Apple is likely to establish a technical lead over most smartphone brands as the company moves to a 7nm process for the A12 chip that will power this year’s flagship iPhones. That lead could last well into next year.

And:

This leaves only Apple chipmaker TSMC with 7nm process capabilities, though Samsung has announced plans to develop its own 7nm process in an attempt to win back some of Apple’s A-series chip business. Apple used to split its chip orders between Samsung and TSMC, but the Taiwanese chipmaker beat Samsung to a 10nm process, and has been Apple’s sole supplier since the iPhone 7.

Fascinating. A smaller gap between chip elements means more elements per chip, faster data flow, less heat, and more energy efficiency.

Being first in this particular space to 7nm seems a big deal. That said, Huawei has a 7nm-chip-based phone said to ship in October, and Samsung is hard at work on their own 7nm chip, said to ship in early 2019.

Dongles have been Apple’s top-selling products for the last two years at Best Buy

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9to5Mac:

A report today from Ceros details the trend that Apple’s top-selling products overall (not just accessories) at the major retailer are indeed dongles. Specifically, over the past two years the 3.5mm to Lightning adapter and 3.3-foot USB-C to Lightning cable have been Best Buy’s most popular Apple branded items.

While AirPods just took over as the most popular individual product as of Q2 2018, dongles still prevailed as the top revenue generator overall, with Apple’s headphones category coming in second place.

Used to be, every cell phone brand made its own unique charger. That made for very little reusability and a nightmare if you forgot your charger. Outcry ensued, and we’ve now moved to two main form factors, both of which plug into the same USB brick. Much better.

This dongle thing feels like the pendulum swinging the other way. Now we have USB-C as a standard on our Macs, but dongles and USB-C confusion means we’ve got similar problems if we forget our dongle.

Will Apple ever move the iPhone from Lightning to USB-C? That certainly would simplify things for travelers, one dongle to rule them all.

UPDATE: I’m guessing this is unit sales, not revenue.

Inside the iPhone repair ecosystem: Where do replacement parts come from and can you trust them?

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Juli Clover, MacRumors:

There’s a thriving market for unofficial, aftermarket iPhone parts, and in China, there are entire massive factories that are dedicated to producing these components for repair shops unable to get ahold of parts that have been produced by Apple.

The entire Apple device repair ecosystem is fascinating, complex, and oftentimes confusing to consumers given the disconnect between Apple, Apple Authorized Service Providers, third-party factories, and independent repair shops, so we thought we’d delve into the complicated world of Apple repairs.

Terrific, fascinating read.

Apple is beefing up a team to explore making its own health chips

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CNBC:

Apple has a team exploring a custom processor that can make better sense of health information coming off sensors from deep inside its devices, job listings show.

Here’s an Apple job listing for a Sensor ASIC Architect (ASIC being Application-specific integrated circuit).

Building custom chips for narrow functions can help Apple add new features and improve efficiency of its hardware while protecting its intellectual property from would-be imitators.

Rene Ritchie just posted an excellent Vector episode that talks about Apple’s chip ambitions. Apple’s chip investments are paying dividends and they are slowly specializing, expanding their proprietary chips, bringing capabilities to future products that other companies cannot simply copy.

Motherboard on the iPhone 7’s so-called Loop Disease

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Motherboard:

For the past six months, Cerva has been receiving large numbers of iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus devices—often 10 to 15 per week—with a similar issue: one of the pads that connects the audio chip, which is located on the motherboard near the SIM card tray, has come loose.

And:

The early symptoms are a grayed-out Voice Memos icon, a grayed-out “speaker” button during phone calls, or intermittent freezing. Eventually, the phone can get stuck on the Apple logo instead of powering on. Cerva calls the issue “loop disease,” in reference to “touch disease,” a similar issue that affected thousands of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus units starting around 2016.

And:

The fix, Jones and Cerva agreed, is straightforward: they remove the audio chip, then solder a small segment of wire underneath it to repair the connection. Cerva can complete the repair in just 15 minutes, he said; Jones said that a qualified shop should be able to carry out the repair for between $100 and $150.

If you have, or know someone with an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus, read the article and check out the image (with the greyed out Speaker icon) towards the bottom of the article.

The iPhones 7 were released in September 2016.

Rene Ritchie digs into the details of iPhone battery life

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[VIDEO] I love this video (embedded in the main Loop post). Rene Ritchie digs into all aspects of iPhone battery life, taking on various myths and habits, laying out the details and truths behind each. Worth your time.

Marques Brownlee: The 2019 iPhone X Models

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[VIDEO] First things first, the appearance here (video embedded in main Loop post) is that someone leaked actual production cases of the soon-to-be-announced new iPhone models. If they are fakes, as opposed to leaks, they are damned good fakes.

Either way, take this video with a big grain of salt.

Fake? Real? History as our guide, we’ll know more in about a month.

TidBITS digs into USB Restricted Mode

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Josh Centers talks through USB Restricted Mode, the politics of opening a backdoor into iOS, and the mechanics of breaking into an iPhone via the Lightning port.

Bottom line:

If USB Restricted Mode isn’t causing you any trouble, leave it on. Although it doesn’t offer complete protection against an alert attacker who can get access to your device quickly, it’s not worthless. Once your device has been locked for more than 60 minutes, nothing we know of can crack it.

Rene Ritchie’s detailed 2018 MacBook Pro review

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Rene Ritchie does an excellent job digging through all the bits and pieces, pros and cons, that make up the new MacBook Pro. If you are considering a new machine, this is a worthwhile, detailed read.

iFixit teardown of the 3rd gen, 2018 MacBook Pro butterfly keyboard

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iFixit:

The 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard is a wealth of secrets—it just keeps surprising us. Just when we think we’ve exhausted one vein of tasty tech ore, we find something new. And today, we bring this trove to you.

And:

We pumped this keyboard full of particulates to test our ingress-proofing theory. We started with a fine, powdered paint additive to add a bit of color and enable finer tracking (thanks for the tip, Dan!). Lo and behold, the dust is safely sequestered at the edges of the membrane, leaving the mechanism fairly sheltered. The holes in the membrane allow the keycap clips to pass through, but are covered by the cap itself, blocking dust ingress.

And:

On the 2018 keyboard, with the addition of more particulate and some aggressive typing, the dust eventually penetrates under the sheltered clips, and gets on top of the switch—so the ingress-proofing isn’t foolproof just yet.

I do appreciate the testing, good to know the threshold at work here. Bottom line, don’t dump a bunch of powder or sand on your keyboard and you should be fine.

If you want a more traditional, picture-laden keyboard teardown, iFixit has that too.

And on a related note, here’s John Gruber’s take on the legal/marketing side of the new keyboard, and the quieter vs. better at keeping out debris language.

Apple says third-generation keyboards exclusive to 2018 MacBook Pro

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Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Some customers have been hoping that Apple will start swapping out second-generation keyboards with third-generation keyboards, as part of its service program, but MacRumors has learned that isn’t the plan.

When asked if Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers will be permitted to replace second-generation keyboards on 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro models with the new third-generation keyboards, if necessary, Apple said, no, the third-generation keyboards are exclusive to the 2018 MacBook Pro.

This isn’t terribly surprising, as the architecture of the new machines has changed and the swap-out goes way beyond simply swapping keyboards. But it is good to know.

The new high-end MacBook Pro and “thermal throttling”

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[VIDEO] A new video is making its way around the net, under the title “MacBook Pro 15 (2018) – Beware the Core i9”. The video (embedded in the main Loop post), is a reasonably measured analysis of one specific new MacBook Pro model, the highest end, spec’ed with a 2.9GHz 6-core Intel Core i9 processor.

Before we get into the video at all, the issues Dave Lee raises are specific to this configuration. I’ve seen not seen anything to make me believe the over-throttling Dave encountered occurs on lower-spec’ed models. Per usual, ping me if I’ve missed anything, or if you see someone encountering this issue with, say, a 2.6GHz 6-core i7.

On to specifics:

Dave runs an Adobe Premiere render on Mac and Windows, the Mac using the i9, and the Windows machine using an i7. Under high load:

  • The Windows laptop (Intel i7) runs at an average clock speed of about 3.1GHz, temp of ~87°C
  • The MacBook Pro (high end i9) runs at an average clock speed of 2.2GHz, temp of ~90°C

In this specific case, with this specific configuration, with this specific i9 chip, the MacBook Pro runs hotter and slower under intense load.

Dave then sticks his MacBook Pro in the freezer and repeats the experiment, and the thermal throttling is significantly reduced, as the Mac no longer has to throttle performance to keep the machine from overheating.

I’d be very interested in seeing this experiment repeated by other folks. Thermal throttling is not the villain here. It’s about the ability of the Mac itself to dissipate heat efficiently. Once the chip heats up, that’s when thermal throttling kicks in.

Watch the video, draw your own conclusions.

2018 MacBook Pro Geekbench 4 scores

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John Poole, Primate Labs:

Apple announced updated 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros last week. Let’s take a quick look at the performance of these new laptops using Geekbench 4 results from the Geekbench Browser.

For those unfamiliar with Geekbench 4, it is our cross-platform CPU and GPU benchmark. Higher scores are better, with double the score indicating double the performance.

Note that Geekbench scores tend to improve over time, as startup tasks like iCloud syncing tend to eat CPU time when a machine is first configured. Once those “one time” tasks are completed, usually after a few days, they no longer skew the results.

Benchmarks like these offer a nice way of comparing apples to apples when you are considering a move from one machine to another. If your workload includes very specific, repetitive, high-intensity tasks (such as audio or video rendering, for example), you might want to seek out benchmarks comparing results for those specific tasks.

The great Apple keyboard cover-up

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iFixit:

Here’s an inflammatory take for you: Apple’s new quieter keyboard is actually a silent scheme to fix their keyboard reliability issues. We’re in the middle of tearing down the newest MacBook Pro, but we’re too excited to hold this particular bit of news back:

Apple has cocooned their butterfly switches in a thin, silicone barrier.

First things first, this is indeed an inflammatory take, joining countless other headlines lambasting Apple and the MacBook butterfly keyboard.

But, the thing is, it looks like Apple has, indeed, addressed the problem. That thin, silicone barrier looks designed specifically to keep dust and crumbs from embedding themselves beneath the key press mechanism.

Not sure why Apple never came right out and said, “Our bad, we missed the dust problem with these keyboards, but we’ll fix it.” Is this lawyer-driven? A concern about class-action lawsuits and liability?

No matter, it seems to me that this 3rd generation keyboard is the fix. I’ve typed on it and I am comfortable with the feel and sound. Until I bring one home, I’m not sure how I will feel about the Touch Bar and the soft escape key, the boxier arrow keys, but I do like the keyboard feel and feel optimistic that the dark days of dust breaking the keyboard may just be behind us.

There’s a nice video embedded in the iFixit article that walks through the problems with the keyboard and shows the silicon membrane, up close. Apple keyboard cover-up. Get it?

A patent that offers insight into the complexity of Apple’s AirPower charging pad

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About a month ago, Serenity Caldwell was a guest on episode 224 of John Gruber’s The Talk Show. About 4:30 in, the topic turned to Apple’s AirPower charging pad.

I’ve been thinking about the long delay since the original AirPower announcement (back in September, almost a year ago) and yesterday, on Twitter, someone mentioned a recently discovered European patent, covered in this Patently Apple article and pointed me to the Serenity Caldwell Talk Show appearance as well.

First things first, take a look at the patent article and scroll down to the second picture, which highlights what Apple calls an Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) System. From the description:

In order to ensure maximum power transfer efficiency to the Apple Watch, an Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) director such as IPT director unit #208 may be provided. The IPT director unit may function to direct the IPT field of the inductive power transmitter for receipt by the inductive power receiver of the Apple Watch.

The idea would be to have these table hockey bumpy things redirect power from the charging mat to be able to charge items that might not sit flat. One perfect example of this is an Apple Watch with a links band, or any band that does not open completely to allow it to lay flat.

This is a terrific solution. But (and this is pure speculation), this may be part of the reason we do not yet see an AirPower in the wild. As Serenity says in her Talk Show interview, Apple appears to be going far beyond what is necessary to simply charge an iPhone. There’s the complexity of the IPT system to transfer power to add-on devices to charge an Apple Watch.

There’s also the goal of communicating the charging state to software, so your iPhone can tell you the current charge of each device on the AirPower.

All this is speculation, but it’s not hard to see that Apple doesn’t want to ship yet another simple induction pad. As Apple does, they want to ship something special, something uniquely Apple.

One question I’d ask is, if Apple could do it all over again, knowing what they know now, would they still have made the AirPower announcement back in September? And, if not, what wires were crossed that caused that early announcement?

1990, meet 2018: How far does 20MHz of Macintosh IIsi power go today?

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Chris Wilkinson, Ars Technica:

I was browsing a local online classifieds site and stumbled across a gem: a Macintosh IIsi. Even better, the old computer was for sale along with the elusive but much-desired Portrait Display, a must-have for the desktop publishing industry of its time. I bought it the very next day.

It took me several days just to get the machine to boot at all, but I kept thinking back to that article. Could I do any better? With much less? Am I that arrogant? Am I a masochist?

Cupertino retro-curiosity ultimately won out: I decided to enroll the Macintosh IIsi as my main computing system for a while. A 1990 bit of gear would now go through the 2018 paces. Just how far can 20MHz of raw processing power take you in the 21st century?

If you are even mildly curious about this experiment, I urge you to follow the link. It does not disappoint. A geek’s delight, a worthy rabbit hole.

iPhones and USB-C

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I came across this Android Central article over the weekend, a discussion about USB-C charging:

Unless you have a Moto Z series phone, none of the cheap adapters you see for sale offer a headphone jack and charging port. None of them. They all may not work with every Moto Z model, either. My advice is to just stay away from them.

This is because of parts of the USB-C specification that are optional. Motorola offers these options, but phones like the Pixel 2 and almost all others do not. It may be possible to define some fancy logic that allows this to happen, but you won’t get it for $12 on eBay or Amazon.

A few weeks ago, a rumor surfaced that Apple would replace the iPhone Lightning port with USB-C. Color me extremely skeptical.

The Lightning spec is consistent and the hardware is reliable (for the most part).

On the USB-C side, things are a bit of a mess. From this take by Android Authority:

Even the seemingly most basic function of USB Type-C — powering devices — has become a mess of compatibility issues, conflicting proprietary standards, and a general lack of consumer information to guide purchasing decisions. The problem is that the features supported by different devices aren’t clear, yet the defining principle of the USB Type-C standard makes consumers think everything should just work.

We’ve seen this issue on the MacBook, though staying with Apple specified adapters works fine. But iPhone adapters are much more of a commodity. Who doesn’t own a 3rd party Lightning cable or adapter for their iPhone? With Lightning, you know it’s iPhone compatible and the bad cables/frauds are sussed out pretty easily.

If Apple replaced Lightning with USB-C on the iPhone, they’d have to ensure that the USB-C standard issues would not become Apple customer support issues.

Why Apple’s AirPower wireless charger is taking so long to make

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Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple said in September that the iPhone X and iPhone 8 could be charged wirelessly. It recommended charging hubs from Mophie and Belkin, an unusual move for the consumer-hardware specialist. Apple also announced its own AirPower charger, but said it wouldn’t be released until 2018.

And:

Company engineers have been toiling away to address problems. One challenge is making sure the charger doesn’t overheat. Another is the complexity of the circuitry, according to people familiar with the device’s development.

And:

Unlike wireless chargers on the market today, the AirPower is designed to charge three devices simultaneously: an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods with a still-to-be-released wireless charging case.

And, the point I think is the heart of the problem:

Apple also wants users to be able to place any of their devices anywhere on the charging mat to begin a charge. That ambitious goal requires the company to pack the AirPower with multiple charging sensors, a process that has proven difficult, the people said.

If you take apart a Qi wireless charger, you’ll find a coil of fabric-coated wire, the induction coil behind the physics of wireless charging. That coil is always round, and the chargers you buy are typically round as well, keeping the case design at its smallest form factor.

Here’s a video showing a tear-down of a Samsung Qi charger. Jump to about 3:58 in to see the coil.

Apple’s AirPower charger is oblong, not the same shape of the existing, circular Qi chargers. Some physics to solve for there. There’s also the complexity of a number of objects placed in unpredictable proximity on the oblong coil and it seems understandable that this is a tricky problem to solve.

Add to that:

The AirPower charger is also more advanced than the current competition because it includes a custom Apple chip running a stripped down version of the iOS mobile operating system to conduct on-device power management and pairing with devices. Apple engineers have also been working to squash bugs related to the on-board firmware, according to the people familiar.

This is a complex piece of engineering.

UPDATE: Interesting tweet from Jeff Guilfoyle, with a picture of overlapping coils. The idea being the controlling circuitry would switch between coils as needed. Interesting.

Apple, Grayshift whac-a-mole

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From this New York Times article:

Apple said it was planning an iPhone software update that would effectively disable the phone’s charging and data port — the opening where users plug in headphones, power cables and adapters — an hour after the phone is locked. While a phone can still be charged, a person would first need to enter the phone’s password to transfer data to or from the device using the port.

And from the Elcomsoft blog:

In the second beta of 11.4.1 released just days ago, activating the SOS mode enables USB restrictions, too. This feature was not present in the first 11.4.1 beta (and it is not part of any other version of iOS including iOS 12 beta). In all other versions of iOS, the SOS mode just disables Touch/Face ID. The SOS feature in iOS 11.4.1 beta 2 makes your iPhone behave exactly like if you did not unlock it for more than an hour, effectively blocking all USB communications until you unlock the device (with a passcode, as Touch ID/Face ID would be also disabled).

And this from Motherboard, with the title Cops Are Confident iPhone Hackers Have Found a Workaround to Apple’s New Security Feature:

“Grayshift has gone to great lengths to future proof their technology and stated that they have already defeated this security feature in the beta build. Additionally, the GrayKey has built in future capabilities that will begin to be leveraged as time goes on,” a June email from a forensic expert who planned to meet with Grayshift, and seen by Motherboard, reads, although it is unclear from the email itself how much of this may be marketing bluff.

And:

A second person, responding to the first email, said that Grayshift addressed USB Restricted Mode in a webinar several weeks ago.

My instinct is that this is, indeed, a marketing bluff. But one without teeth if it doesn’t work.

Whac-a-mole (note the spelling, a trademark thing, I think).

Hands on with HomePod stereo pairs and AirPlay 2

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[VIDEO] Jeff Benjamin, 9to5Mac, on what you can do with AirPlay 2:

  • Quickly see what’s playing in every room on every speaker
  • Play the same song, in sync, in every room
  • Play different songs on different speakers
  • Use Siri to play different songs in different rooms
  • Stream to rooms without grouping speakers

Take the time to watch Jeff’s excellent video, embedded in the main Loop post. It starts with the basics of setting up a stereo pair, but then comes the good stuff, as he dives into the details of AirPlay 2. Absolutely worth the watch.

Video compares official Apple iPhone X replacement displays with aftermarket displays

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[VIDEO] Rajesh Pandey, iPhoneHacks:

Getting the 5.8-inch OLED display of the iPhone X repaired from Apple is an expensive process. With Apple charging hundreds of dollars for a screen replacement if you don’t have Apple Care for your iPhone X, it is not surprising that many people end up getting their screen replaced from a third-party repair store which charges significantly less than Apple.

Is there a downside to using an aftermarket replacement? In the video (embedded in the main Loop post), Rajesh takes a look at several aftermarket solutions, compared to an official OEM replacement display.

I came away from this video wondering how representative this is. Do all aftermarket displays suffer from these same shortcomings? At the very least, I would definitely do my homework before I went for a 3rd party replacement display.

How Apple dethroned Intel as the world’s most innovative chipmaker

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Ashraf Eassa, The Motley Fool:

Back in 2013, Apple introduced the A7 system on a chip (SoC) as part of its then-flagship smartphone, the iPhone 5s.

The A7 was the first 64-bit ARM processor.

Now, Intel’s chips, at the time, ran at much higher frequencies (in excess of 3 gigahertz), but what the strong per-gigahertz performance of the A7 chip signaled to me was that Apple had built a very impressive base from which to build up in future smartphone chips.

And:

While Apple is great at chip design, it doesn’t manufacture its own chips — it outsources production to third parties. Apple’s A-series chips through the A7 were manufactured exclusively by Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company was the exclusive manufacturer of the A8, A10, and A11 chips. TSMC and Samsung reportedly split the orders for the A9.

Both TSMC and Samsung have delivered new manufacturing technologies at a breakneck pace. The performance, power consumption, and economic viability of a chip are determined heavily by the technologies upon which it’s manufactured.

Apple is relentless. As they constantly innovate in chip design, they can take advantage of whatever manufacturing advances bring the most performance advantages for each particular chip generation.

The result:

I believe that when Apple introduces its next iPhone in about four months, it will deliver equal or better CPU performance to Intel’s best notebook processors designed to consume 15 watts but at a fraction of the power consumption.

Amazing.

Next generation iPhone chips go into production

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Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. manufacturing partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has started mass production of next-generation processors for new iPhones launching later this year, according to people familiar with the matter.

The processor, likely to be called the A12 chip, will use a 7-nanometer design that can be smaller, faster and more efficient than the 10-nanometer chips in current Apple devices like the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, the people said.

7 nanometers is the next planned design threshold for semiconductor manufacturing, with 5 nanometer designs about 3 years away.

To give a sense of the curve here:

  • 2008: 45nm
  • 2010: 32nm
  • 2012: 22nm
  • 2014: 14nm
  • 2017: 10nm
  • 2018: 7nm
  • 2021: 5nm

A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. Next step smaller? An angstrom is one tenth of a nanometer. So the 7nm threshold we are about to breach is also the 70 angstrom threshold. Tiny.

On the report of 2016 MacBook Pro butterfly keyboards failing twice as frequently as older models

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Mike Wuerthele, Apple Insider:

Following anecdotal reports of a keyboard more prone to failure than in previous years, AppleInsider has collected service data for the first year of release of the 2014, 2015, and 2016 MacBook Pros, with an additional slightly shorter data set for the 2017 model year given that it hasn’t been available for a year yet.

Not including any Touch Bar failures, the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard is failing twice as often in the first year of use as the 2014 or 2015 MacBook Pro models, and the 2017 is better, but not by a lot.

First things first, this is some nice, boots-on-the-ground reporting. The numbers are relatively small, but seems a good, if not precise, indicator of the problem.

Apple has a second-generation MacBook Pro keyboard. It is in the 2017 MacBook Pro, and repaired 2016 models. The repair percentages on those are up from the 2014 and 2015 keyboards as well, but not nearly as much as the 2016.

Note that all Apple Store MacBook Pro stock has the new second-generation butterfly keyboard. You can’t walk into an Apple Store and walk out with the old MacBook Pro keyboard. So the data that matters going forward is the repair data on machines with that new keyboard.

I’d like to see a bigger survey of machines with that new keyboard, to get a surer sense of the success Apple has had in solving the problem. The sense I get in talking with people at my local Apple Store is that the new keyboard design made a world of difference in terms of reliability. This just words? Is the dust problem still there?

One thing that I know is true: There’s no way for an average buyer to take their machine apart and swap out the keyboard if they do encounter this problem. As Mike says, it’s not an easy repair, requiring complete disassembly of the machine.

Why the next Mac processor transition won’t be like the last two

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Jason Snell, Macworld:

This week’s report from Bloomberg that Apple is planning on moving the Mac to its own chips starting in 2020 is the culmination of years of growing speculation about the future of the Mac. I’ve been impressed by Apple’s use of ARM chips in new Macs while being skeptical about the prospects of a full transition.

But if we accept the Bloomberg report—and it’s from reporter Mark Gurman’s sources, which are generally excellent—it’s time to shift from speculating about whether or not Apple would do this and start to analyze why the company would make this move, and what form the transition might take.

Thoughtful piece by Jason Snell. Definitely worth reading.

Obviously, this post is based on speculation. But, as Jason says, Mark Gurman has an excellent track record. The question of why Apple would do this is an obvious one. If this is Apple’s plan, no one outside the company can answer it. But two things spring to mind for me.

First, moving the Mac to a chipset that they design and build would give them that much more control over the full stack. Less reliance on outside vendors, the ability to create a more efficient and more powerful set of devices.

Second, moving the Mac to the same chipset as the iPad would (and this is way out of my league conjecture here) make it that much easier to merge macOS and iOS, somewhere down the line.

‘BabelPod’ brings indirect Bluetooth audio and line-in to HomePod

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Jeff Benjamin, 9to5Mac:

Software architect Andrew Faden hacked together a line-in and Bluetooth input for HomePod called BabelPod. Based around a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W and a few other essential parts, Faden created a clever workaround that affords both indirect Bluetooth and line-in connectivity for Apple’s recently-launched wireless speaker.

Faden also had to write the software to take a line-in or Bluetooth connection and translate it into an AirPlay stream that the HomePod can understand.

This is a terrifically clever idea. Seemed only a matter of time until someone came up with this sort of solution.

On last week’s “HomePod One Month Later” Vector podcast, Rene Ritchie and I discussed Apple’s rationale for not shipping HomePod with a line-in port or generic Bluetooth support. Rene made the excellent point that if Apple did support those, the early HomePod reviews would have been based on the performance of external devices upon which they had no control. Fascinating point and one I agree with.

Here’s a link to Andrew Faden’s BabelPod page. Lots of detail in case you want to make your own.

Apple grabs two-year lead in Face ID 3-D sensing race

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Reuters:

Most Android phones will have to wait until 2019 to duplicate the 3D sensing feature behind Apple’s Face ID security, three major parts producers have told Reuters, handicapping Samsung and others on a technology that is set to be worth billions in revenue over the next few years.

And:

Tech research house Gartner predicts that by 2021, 40 percent of smartphones will be equipped with 3D cameras, which can also be used for so-called augmented reality, or AR, in which digital objects cling tightly to images of the real world.

And:

According to parts manufacturers Viavi Solutions Inc, Finisar Corp and Ams AG, bottlenecks on key parts will mean mass adoption of 3D sensing will not happen until next year, disappointing earlier expectations.

That means that China’s Huawei, Xiaomi and others could be a total of almost two years behind Apple, which launched Face ID with its iPhone X anniversary phone last September.

Supply chain management is a critical part of Apple’s product strategy. The more of its parts and raw materials that Apple can control, the more accurately it can plan for a product’s release and lifecycle.

And if Apple can control an up and coming vital technology, preventing rivals from shipping competing product? That’s a game changer.